Fake meat: burgers grown in beakers

This article was taken from the September issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

The prototype is carried to the table by a lab assistant in starch-stiff whites. "What we're making here is basically wasted muscle," says Mark Post, as he picks up the clear plastic dish containing a pinkish liquid and holds it up to the strip lighting for closer inspection. "Right now, it probably has the texture of an undercooked egg."

In a lab at the biomedical-engineering faculty at the University of Technology in Eindhoven, Post is holding an early example of what he hopes will be the food of the future: in vitro meat. Post, the university's professor of angiogenesis (growth of new blood vessels), is a specialist in tissue engineering. He is also part of a small team of Dutch scientists racing to develop the ability to grow muscle independent of a living animal so that it can be produced in commercial quantities and sold as meat.

He walks over to what looks like a large oven in the centre of the lab. Think of this Flexercell Strain Unit, he says, as an exercise machine for the microscopic skeletal muscle cells - in vitro meat, in other words - that he and his team are cultivating. To move on from that undercooked-egg texture, muscles need pumping.

"We're developing a very simplified version of what we know as meat," he explains. "The cells are grown in this dish within a growing medium and this unit is where they receive the electrical stimulation. These electrodes ensure there is an electrical current - about 1Hz - passing through the cells. To make these skeletal cells develop into muscle, they need to be constantly exercised, just like in the body." This, he explains, is one of the scientific hurdles for in vitro meat that has not yet been fully addressed. "We can convert stem cells into skeletal muscle cells; however, turning them into trained skeletal muscle appears to be a little harder."

But overcoming that challenge would bring vast rewards. The red-meat market was worth $61 billion last year in the US alone, according to Mintel. Carve out even a pastrami-thin slice and the in vitro pioneers will be wealthy beyond imagination. The rewards are not only financial. Livestock's Long Shadow, an influential 2006 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, calculated that the global livestock industry is responsible for about 18 per cent of mankind's greenhouse-gas emissions - more than all of our cars, trains, shipping and planes combined. The FAO said it also accounts for more than eight per cent of our freshwater use, largely to grow crops fed to animals. Meat production now uses up 70 per cent of the world's agricultural land. And then, of course, there is the animal suffering attributed to the industry and intensive animal-farming.

Last year, the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) announced a $1 million prize for the first team to develop and market in vitro meat. There were, admittedly, some pretty exacting clauses: it set the rather optimistic deadline of June 30, 2012. It also insisted that the winning entrant must "produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike; and manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially... at a competitive price". Lastly, it said a panel of ten Peta judges would assess the taste and texture of the in vitro chicken, prepared using a classic Southern fried-chicken recipe. No pressure, then.

Yet the science remains stubborn. To date, only a handful of scientists has attempted to tackle the considerable technical obstacles to cultivating meat. At the vanguard is the Dutch consortium that includes Mark Post. Post - who also specialises in "growing" new blood vessels for heart-attack victims - says either mechanical or electrical stimulation can be used to exercise the cells, but electricity is more energy-efficient than placing cells in, say, tubes that are then pulsated using vacuums. The reasoning is simple: once you scale up the technology for commercial use, minimising energy use will be key to making the manufacturing process viable.

This energy use is why Post sees neither of these methods as a longer-term way to exercise the muscle cells. Instead, he hopes to develop an alternative method by observing the cellular changes that occur under current techniques.

"We want to look at how the cells change, as well as their genetic programme," he says. "Which protein-manufacturing programs do they turn on to train them? Then we can use other ways to replicate that. For example, we might be able to use growth factors such as hormones. Inside us we have many natural proteins, such as bone morphogenetic protein and other transforming growth-factor proteins, which affect the differentiation of skeletal muscles. In real life, in the mammalian system, this is achieved with a cocktail of these hormones in a time-dependent and location-dependent manner. But we could manufacture them quite easily by using modified E. coli bacteria. We could then add them to the muscle as required."